Tudors creator is back with Vikings

Michael Hirst, speaking on the phone from his quiet hamlet in Oxfordshire in the English countryside — “My children say we live in a field,” he says dryly, “in this bitterly cold, miserable, wet winter we’re having,” — is enjoying a brief respite from the murder and mayhem of Vikings, his new, nine-part miniseries about the Viking invasions of England in the eighth century.

Vikings premieres Sunday on History Television.

Hirst, screenwriter of Shekhar Kapur’s Oscar-nominated Tudor epic Elizabeth and the creator-writer of The Tudors, is bracing himself against the inevitable tide of criticism from historians and self-styled “Viking experts,” who he fully expects to nitpick every detail of his Viking tale, right down to the hockey-helmet headgear and their less-than-fastidious personal hygiene.

The eighth-century raiders who sailed west across what we now call the North Sea were not known for keeping meticulous written records, but that won’t stop the experts from wringing their hands over supposed inaccuracies, as they did with The Tudors.

Hirst’s reaction? A distinctly Shakespearean Pshaw! Let the nitpickers have their say. Hirst knows what is accurate and what is inaccurate, what is a matter of historical record and what is simply speculation.

“I’ve read their books!” Hirst says incredulously, of the historian naysayers. Forsooth. To complain endlessly and unnecessarily is to make much ado about nothing.

Gustaf Skarsgard as Floki.

“I’m enormously anxious,” Hirst admits later. “But then I’m anxious by nature. I’m sure I will get three or four or five of these guys breathing down my neck saying, ‘It wasn‘t like that!’ How do they know? How can they know? Can you not get it into your heads that there’s a huge difference between drama and documentary?

“I suppose I could just walk away. But I don’t walk away because I base everything … from reading their bloody books!”

Hirst is still sporting inner bruises from The Tudors’ historian naysayers, even though The Tudors did exactly what Hirst hoped it would do: It brought the romance and intrigue of Tudor England to a younger generation who, before then, might have believed Henry VIII was named after a chocolate bar. The Tudors rekindled interest in history in junior- and secondary-level classrooms throughout the UK and beyond.

“It became this industry,” Hirst recalled. “It was amazing.”

Travis Fimmel as Ragnar Lothbrok, and Katheryn Winnick as “Lagertha.

Hirst does not expect Vikings to have the same effect, necessarily. It’s a different time period, after all. He does hope the Canadian-Irish co-production will both entertain and clear up some long-held myths about Viking lore.

The wrong-headed idea, for example, that the Vikings wore horned helmets. The only authentic Viking helmet ever discovered was noticeably “horn-free.” Visual descriptions dating from the Viking Age don’t sport the Hagar the Horrible look.

As for the idea that the Vikings somehow heralded the legend of King Arthur, a legend, some say, that was created to unite a disorganized, constantly bickering English rabble against the invading hordes, Hirst offers a plain-spoken, decidedly un-Shakespearean reaction:

“Bollocks!”

The true story is so much more interesting, Hirst says. And it makes for better drama.

The Vikings buried their dead in boats, for example. According to Norse belief, warriors entered the glorious and festive realm of Valhalla after death. It was believed that the boats that had served them so well in life would serve them equally well in the afterlife, and so they were set out to sea.

Vikings may have been backward in some respects, but Viking women were afforded basic rights denied other women at the time.

Viking men did not spend all their time looting and pillaging, either. Most were farmers who made their living from rye, barley and oats, tedious and unsexy as that may sound.

They skied. Scandinavians are believed to have developed primitive skis 5,000 years ago. By the time of the Viking Age, Norsemen regarded skis as an efficient and easy way to navigate winter snows on foot.

Most importantly, from Hirst’s perspective as a writer and storyteller, Vikings were never part of a homogeneous, unified group. Vikings rarely acknowledged other Vikings from other villages. They were of their own village, first and foremost. Their allegiance and loyalty was sworn to the village elders and their overlord. The word “Vikings” was a generic term, used in later years to describe Scandinavians who went on seafaring expeditions.

Hirst’s Vikings story picks up with restless, independent-minded farmer and explorer Ragnar Lothbrok, played by Australian actor and former underwear model Travis Fimmel, who briefly played Tarzan in the 2003 series of that name.

Lothbrok has grown weary of the annual raiding parties to the east, where his fellow villagers pillage and loot Russian villagers almost as poor as themselves. He wants to sail west instead, across the much-feared, unexplored open sea. to the home of the Anglo-Saxons, a fabled land said to harbour gold and diamond-encrusted jewels for the taking.

Jessalyn Gilsig as Siggy

Lothbrok’s lord, Earl Haraldson, played by Gabriel Byrne, will have none of it, though. He forbids Lothbrok to waste the village’s resources on such a foolhardy expedition, and they are to raid to the east as they’ve always done. Lothbrok disobeys, naturally enough, and conflict ensues.

“I’ve been interested in the Vikings forever, ever since I was a small boy,” Hirst explains, when asked why he would step back in time, after devoting so much of his writing life to Tudor England in Elizabeth and The Tudors.

Hirst wrote a screenplay about the ninth-century English king Alfred the Great, around the time Elizabeth was being nominated for the Oscar, but that screenplay was left to languish, unproduced. He became interested in the Vikings from his search into the era. He was impressed by their early navigation techniques — long before the discovery of latitude and longitude, their pagan rituals — “I wanted to know about paganism, because paganism is really interesting,” — and Arab accounts and descriptions of Viking ships, records that somehow survived the Dark Ages.

“These were tantalizing, wonderful glimpses of the culture. From a writer’s perspective, reading about the Norse sagas and myths was an endless pleasure — they’re weird and fantastic,” Hirst says. “I kind of put that in my back pocket and waited just for someone to come along and ask if I was still interested in the Vikings.

“And about a year and a half ago, someone asked me just that question.”

Vikings, in all its messy glory, is the result.

The nine-part miniseries, an Irish-Canadian co-production was filmed in Ireland by New Zealand-born, Vancouver-based cameraman John Bartley, who won an Emmy for The X-Files during that series’ early seasons. The background music is by London, Ont. composer Trevor Morris, who won Emmys for his music for The Tudors and The Borgias.

“I really do hope people watch,” Hirst says simply. “It might not be quite what they think.”

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
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